Archive for the ‘Alternate Health’ Category

Kudos to Doctor Tipperman

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

In a previous post, I detailed my experience with cataract surgery, lens implants, and the ruinous results I was left with. I also said that I would provide an update if anything changed, so here it is.

After visits with several other eye doctors, I was referred to a Dr. Tipperman, who is a Will’s Eye Hospital associate, and who specializes in removing and inserting intraocular lens implants. I went to see Dr. Tipperman at one of his branch offices in Philadelpha, and within 10 minutes, he determined why my left implant was causing me so much trouble. It so happens that the implant ( a Technis multifocal) installed by the original surgeon was not centered in my eye correctly, and I was always looking through the line in the bifocal of the lens. He offered to realign the lens, or explant it and install a new lens of my choice.

I chose to have a toric lens implanted. A toric lens is one which corrects for far vision, and astigmatism (it has a spherical and a cylinder correction but no near vision correction). Dr. Tipperman set up a schedule for the surgery on my left eye, and offered to contact the lens manufacturer to ask that the lens be donated to save me the $1800 cost of the lens.

The surgery itself was uneventful. I was awake during the procedure, which only took a few minutes. Dr. Tipperman inserted the new lens underneath the old one, and then cut the old one into pieces with very tiny scissors and removed it. During my checkup the next day, he found that my intraocular pressure had increased quite a bit, and so he drained a little fluid from my eye to relieve it. I had no further trouble with it, and the next day had very good distant vision in my left eye.

At my 3 week checkup, I made an appointment to have my right lens explanted and a new toric lens installed. Again, the surgery was uneventful, and the outcome was even better than with the left eye. It is now 3 weeks since I had the surgery in my right eye, and my far vision is nearly perfect. Of course, I need reading glasses for near work, but I do not have any of the ghosting, starburst, multiple images, and pain which plagued me after my first set of surgeries.

The difference in the quality of care I received is truly amazing. Dr. Tipperman has given me my vision back.

If you want to watch the kind of surgery I had with Dr. Tipperman, you can watch him do a similar surgery with a different patient. WARNING: NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH!

Posted in Alternate Health, Medicine, Nature | No Comments »

Colloidal Silver Chemistry

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

Colloidal Silver is a popular home remedy for a host of ailments. It can be purchased at health food stores, and of course on the internet. It is expensive though considering a pennies worth of silver may cost $10.

For that reason, many people attempt to make it themselves through a simple process of electrolysis. The most common method is simply to put two silver wires into a glass of water and connect the wires to a couple of 9 volt batteries. There are two important variations in the process though, one very good, and one very bad.

So what do people actually make and call Colloidal Silver?

Well, that depends on the method they use. Here are the three main methods I hear of people using:

I) Distilled water + silver anode at room temperature.

In this method, free hydroxyl ions in the water initially react with the positive silver electrode to make silver hydroxide (AgOH). Silver hydroxide is unstable and rapidly decomposes to silver oxide Ag2O. If you remember your high school chemistry, the reaction forumula would be:

2AgOH –> Ag2O + H2O

Silver Oxide is slightly soluble in water, and after electrolyzing for a while you have an ionic silver solution, not colloidal silver. You can prove that silver ions exist at this point by adding a small amount of table salt as a test. The salt will form silver chloride which will precipitate out to form a cloudy liquid because the solubility of silver chloride is 5 times less than silver oxide.1

If the electrolysis is continued, the silver oxide will reach saturation, and then will start to precipitate as colloidal silver oxide. At this point, the solution will start to show the Tyndall effect. This is not strictly colloidal silver, although it does have anti-microbial properties according to the EPA2 Silver oxide is what gives CS its metallic taste which is another indication you have made silver oxide instead of colloidal silver.

This is what most people make and call colloidal silver.

II) High Temperature Colloidal Silver method

If the same method as above is performed while the water is close to boiling temperature, an additional reaction happens. Silver Oxide reduces to metallic silver when close to boiling in the absence of free oxygen3. This makes a straw colored colloidal silver product. The yellow color is caused by the plasmon effect of the extremely small silver particles.

The spontaneous reaction that reduces the silver oxide to silver is:
2Ag2O –> 4Ag + O2

The result is then a solution containing very little silver oxide (ionic silver) and a majority of metallic silver particles. This can also be tested by the addition of some salt. Unlike the CS made at room temperature, this CS does not turn cloudy with the addition of chloride ions showing that it contains few silver ions. This is true colloidal silver.

III) Distilled water + salt + silver anode.

Some people add a little table salt to jump start the electrolysis process. This method produces silver chloride, which has very low solubility and thus produces a cloudy solution. Silver chloride is very photosensitive, and is used in the production of photographic paper. When ingested, silver chloride ions travel into the skin, and are photo reduced by sunlight to metallic silver which then becomes trapped in the skin and cannot be removed. This causes the skin discoloration called Argyria as the amount of silver trapped in the skin increases over time. Ingesting silver chloride is definitely not a good idea.

Which method is better?

Definitely not method III, with salt. Ingesting silver chloride is simply asking for trouble in my opinion.

Method I, the most common way of making CS would seem to be safe however it probably does not remain silver oxide when ingested. The stomach is a chloride rich environment which will convert silver oxide to silver chloride as soon as it is swallowed. Do people take enough silver oxide to be a problem? I don’t know. Perhaps silver chloride is not readily absorbed by the body, but then why is that the people who developed argyria use salt to make their CS? Maybe its simply the dosage.

Method II is my personal preference, as I know the true CS will not react with stomach acid to make silver chloride, and it has an excellent shelf life, even when exposed to light. I have a sample over 2 years old in a clear glass bottle exposed to light every day, and it has not yet degraded.

What I do not know is which product is the better bactericide/antibiotic. There are lots of reports about the effectiveness of CS, but without knowing the production methods, its not clear whether the reports are actually talking about silver oxide, silver chloride, or true metallic colloidal silver.

For a detailed look at how to make Colloidal Silver, see my Colloidal Silver page.

—————————————–

1) Solubility of silver species
Silver Oxide 0.00250 g/100 ml (20C)
Silver Chloride 0.00052 g/100 ml (20C)

2) US EPA Registration Review Schedule: Antimicrobial Pesticides of October, 4, 2006

3) I first discovered this when attempting to make CS using one submerged silver electrode, and one silver electrode suspended 1/8th inch above the water. I then applied 4000 volts from a transformer to create a plasma arc from the suspended electrode to the water surface. This created a clear CS (as tested by the salt method). I noticed that after a time, a yellow to brown layer would form at the top of the solution as it heated up from the plasma arc. As the arc continued to heat the solution, the brown layer would grow further down from the top. I did not know why until recently when I found reference to the decomposition of silver oxide to pure silver at boiling temperature in the absence of oxygen.

Posted in Alternate Health, Science | No Comments »

An Alternate Health Plan Idea
More Freedom, Less bureaucracy

Monday, August 31st, 2009

I must say I am not too pleased with the ill conceived health care the Congress is trying to force upon America, so I thought I would see if I could create a better plan.

My objections to the current proposals are:

  • Too much potential power to the government to make life and death decisions
  • Health care may be arbitrarily rationed.
  • Competition is stifled
  • Taxpayers are expected to pay for illegal alien’s health care
  • Excessive bureaucracy is created.

    • As I have written before, insurance itself is one of the reasons health care is so expensive. See my previous post for an explanation. On the other hand, a single payer system would help lower the costs.

    Here is what I would propose:

    Every Citizen would be issued a health account, and initially funded or charged with a one-time credit based on age at inception. For the sake of argument, lets say that people over 60 would be funded with $200,000, and newborns with $300,000 credit to their health accounts.

    This account would be used to pay all health related expenses for the patient, with no restrictions on exactly what treatments would be paid for. This would allow the patient to choose whatever treatments the patient thought best. If the patient believed a heart bypass operation served him best, it would be paid from his account. If he believed that the alternative chelation therapy best served his health, it also would be paid from his account. This would allow the ultimate in health freedom.

    All drug costs could be paid from this account if the patient chose to do so. A small copay could be instituted to make the plan less expensive for the country.

    The catch is of course; once the account was depleted, there would be no more taxpayer funded health care for that individual. If the patient wanted additional coverage, he would have to purchase it privately and would be encouraged to do so. This may sound bad, but the fact is, most private insurance policies carry a maximum lifetime benefits restriction; so this is no different than a private plan.

    In addition, health care providers would be required to advise each patient up front of the cost of their services and of any recommended treatments, including any optional treatments available. This would allow the patient to make better choices, knowing that their own health care account was a limited resource. This alone would greatly reduce the cost of health care, as presently patients have no idea what a procedure or test is going to cost, and if they have insurance they generally do not care as long as the insurance company is paying.

    The cost of child-birth would be born by the mother’s and father’s accounts, and the cost of post-natal child care by the child’s own account. In the case of a missing or unknown father, the cost would be born solely by the mother’s account.

    In the case of an illegal (no health ID card), any emergency health care costs would be billed to the illegal’s government, and the illegal could be deported to his country of origin.

    All cosmetic surgeries would not be covered except in the case of a disfiguring accident. Lets face it, people should not expect the taxpayer to pay for their nose job.

    All pre-existing conditions would of course be covered.

    The government’s basic duties in this system would be:

  • Perform the appropriate accounting
  • Pay the health providers for treatments rendered.
  • Audit providers to prevent fraud.
  • Provide patients with semi-annual statements of their account
  • Provide patients additional statements on demand for a small fee
  • Provide patients with information regarding alternative cost effective treatments

    • Under this system, there would be no need for Medicare/Medicaid, so that system would be disbanded. There would be no need for VA health care, so that system could be disbanded also. There would be no need for prescription drug plans. All state plans could likewise be disbanded if states chose to do so as they would be unnecessary. The elimination of all of these redundant systems would provide a large cost savings to the taxpayer.

    How much would this cost? All health care is expensive, and over the course of a lifetime can reach astounding amounts. A bypass operation can cost $100,000, and chemotherapy can easily exceed that several times over. However, let us assume that on average, a person will only use 1/4 of their allotment. For newborns, this would mean $75,000 would have to be paid into their account over their lifetime. Assuming a working life of 45 years, that would require $1700 per year in taxes for each person. Since not everyone actually works and pays taxes, that means the amount of tax burden an actual worker would have to pay would be much higher, probably twice that amount.

    I believe this would still be cheaper than our current system, and would provide incentives to not waste medical resources. It would bring down hospital costs because under the current system, the cost of non-payers using hospital services is born by those that do pay. Since the amount of free-loaders would be greatly reduced, hospital costs would come down. However, there is no such thing a free lunch. Somebody must pay, and that means the taxpayer through some sort of payroll tax perhaps similar to the Social Security scheme.

    This system would be easily augmented by:

  • Allowing people to add credits to their own accounts at a discount, extending the plan to include health savings account features. IE: buy a dollars worth of health care for 80 cents.
  • Allowing employers to add to their employees health accounts as an employee benefit.
  • Reimbursing military or civil service personnel’s accounts for service related injuries. This would be fair to those facing above average dangers working in hazardous jobs.
  • Allowing a person to transfer a portion of his own benefits to his/her spouse.

    • This system would not:

  • Arbitrarily decide who gets what treatments.
  • Prohibit private insurance.
  • Discriminate against any class of citizen.
  • Require 1000 pages of legalese to describe.
  • Stifle medical research.
  • Reduce services available.
  • Prohibit private payment for medical service.
  • Restrict patients to any specific providers.
  • Make any medical decisions for the patients.
  • Stifle competition between technologies or providers

    • Would this work? I think so, and I would happily live under such a system.

    Posted in Alternate Health, Economy | 1 Comment »

    Homeopathy, the Other Medicine

    Monday, January 19th, 2009

    Homeopathy – What Is it?

    There are two main kinds of medicine. The one most of us are familiar with is called allopathic medicine. the term allopathy means ‘Different Suffering’, and uses medicines which produce different effects than the disease it is used to treat. An alternative medicine doctor I met once calls allopathy N2D2 medicine as doctors typically follow a Name the Disease, Name the Drug approach.

    Homeopathy means ‘Similar Suffering’ and relies on medicines which produce the same effects as the disease. This system of medicine was developed by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann as a result of observations he made while working as a medical text translator. He was translating an article about the use of quinine to treat malaria. At the time, the prevailing thought was that quinine worked because it tasted bitter. Hahnemann didn’t think that sounded plausible or scientific, so he took quinine to see what would happen. The quinine gave him symptoms similar to that of malaria, even though he didn’t actually have the disease. This observation lead him to the discovery that like cures like — similar suffering — and homeopathy was born.

    Most people think that the heart of homeopathy is the ‘infinitesimal dose’, the way the medicinal substances are highly diluted. However this is not true, and even the purest classical homeopaths didn’t always use high dilutions of substance. The heart of homeopathy is matching the effects of the drug to the patient’s signs and symptoms. This is not the same as matching the drug to a specific disease.

    Diluting the medicines was originally done in an attempt to alleviate side effects. Some of the early drugs were highly toxic, both for homeopathic use, and allopathic use. For instance, mercury was often prescribed 100 years ago for the treatment of the common cold, and for the treatment of syphilis. It worked, but the patient often suffered the debilitating effect of mercury poisoning. In fact, the use of mercury as a cure-all lead to the term quack, which is short for the german word ‘quacksalber’, or today in America, we would say quick-silver meaning mercury.

    The Proving — Discovering a Drugs Action

    The substances used for homeopathic healing have always been tested on healthy human volunteers, usually med students, to find out what effects they cause, and thereby what disease symptoms they will cure. A large group of people are given the drug to take over a few weeks time. This is called ‘proving’ the drug. Each volunteer keeps a diary of all the effects the drug has upon him, IE: changes to his health, including his emotions, mental ability, physical symptoms, what part of the day they occur in, which side of the body they happen to, what conditions the prover had which improved, and things which make the symptoms better or worse. At the end of the trial period, the results from all the provers is combined, common elements are noted, and things which only happen to a small portion of the group are assumed to be from some other influence. In this way, a picture of how the drug affects a typical person emerges. The results of the provings for all the substances tested are then compiled in a book called the Materia Medica where any drug available can be referenced.

    The Materia Medica is an indispensable tool for the homeopath, but there is another tool which he needs. It is called a Repertory. The Repertory is a book with almost every possible symtom of illness that had been seen, cataloged by areas of the body, and then more detailed descriptions under that. With each classification, there is a list of every drug which produces that symptom when given to a healthy person.

    Prescribing — The Materia Medica and Repertory

    To use these tools, and prescribe a drug for a patient. A classical homeopath will take the case history, and examine the patient (a very lengthy process… typically 1 to 2 hours), and find all the key symptoms the patient has. Then by consulting the Repertory for each symptom, and recording all the drugs that produce each symptom, the homeopath can work out which of all the drugs produces a match to the most important symptoms of the patient. After having done this, the homeopath then looks up that drug in the Materia Medica to verify that the picture of the drug matches the symptom picture of the patient. Before computers, this could have taken several hours in itself. Thanks to the computer, the drudge work of the Repertory can be fully automated saving the practioner a lot of time. Of course, after gaining experience, the homeopath gets to know the drugs well enough that he doesn’t always have to rigorously do the Repertory work. He just knows the drug picture when he sees it in a patient. If the homeopathic physician does not match the drug as closely as possible to a patient’s exact symptoms, it is not homeopathy, regardless of how the drugs were made!. Also, a classical homeopath will never prescribe combinations of drugs or multiple drugs at the same time, as there would be no clear picture of the drug combination. One drug at a time is the rule.

    My first experience

    The first experience with homeopathy, and indeed my first experience with any form of alternative health care, happened in the early 90′s. Five years before, I had been struck down with cancer and had very extensive surgery to remove it. I had all of my lymph glands removed from my abdomenal cavity. The aftermath of that was that for the next five years, I had constant pain, and was always sick. It seemed no one could help me, until I visited a health clinic in New Jersey where they had a homeopathic practitioner. Jane was not even a licensed physician, she was an artist who had studied with other homeopaths for quite a few years. Since Jane was not an actual physician, she could not actually prescribe for me. Instead, she gave me a private 2 hour lesson in homeopathy, using my own case for an example. After a 2 hour “training session”, Jane pointed me to a drug called Thuja Occidentalis (Tree of life, or the Arbor Vitae bush).

    I took this drug for 2 days, and nothing at all happened. On the third day however, I got sick, with exactly the same feelings and symptoms I had right after the surgery. This continued for about 2 days as I replayed the recovery from the tremendous assault I had endured. Then…. it was gone! I had finally recovered (as much as possible, I can’t regrow body parts) from a curse that had lasted 5 years. I was sold on homeopathy!. So I took some classes to learn more.

    Jane treated me once more, as I had been prone to pneumonia, and had contracted it three years in a row. Jane prescribed Sulphur for me, and it cured the pneumonia quicker than the antibiotics had, plus I haven’t had pneumonia in the 10+ years since.

    But how does it work? It makes no sense to take something which gives me more of what I already have!

    What most people perceive as symptoms of illness is actually the effects of the body’s immune system battling the disease. The disease agent is busy chomping away at your cells replicating itself and flooding your body with poison, but that’s not what you experience. You experience fever, throwing up, diarrhea, etc. This is your immune system at work. Vomiting expels poisons from your body as does diarrhea. Fever prevents viruses from replicating. Swelling is your body diluting the toxins. The smartest doctor of all is your own immune system. All of this internal battle requires energy and strength in your immune system. By taking a non-toxic substance which produces the same effect as your immune system does while fighting a particular disease, some of the load is taken off the immune system and taken up by the drug. This is akin to bringing in reinforcements on the battle field. The drug augments the immune system. It is your immune system which ultimately effects the cure!

    One of the beautiful aspects of homeopathy is that it is not necessary to know what disease a person actually has. It is only necessary to know the symptom set of the patient. This means that with a little training in the technique, ordinary non-medical people can do remarkable things for themselves and their families in the way of treating ordinary illnesses like colds and flu. I consider it a skill which everyone should learn for the day when visiting an MD might not be possible.

    Can it cure everything?

    No, of course not, but neither can allopathy. In today’s world, we are faced with diseases and symptoms that were not prevalent when the original homeopaths did the drug provings. For instance, 100 years ago heart disease was rare, and blood pressure was not routinely checked like it is now. It was not considered important. As a result, there is almost no information in the Materia Medica and the Repertory about hypertension. It is such a shame that homeopathy was all but put out of business by the AMA. If it had not been, there would have been a lot more advances in the drugs and techniques available.

    Spanish Flu — Influenza del Diablo

    One of the biggest events which suggest that homeopathy works and works very well was the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918. At that time, there were homeopathic hospitals, and allopathic hospitals in the US.

    A report to the American Institute of Homeopathy in 1921 documented the dramatic success of homeopathy in the worst flu pandemic in history. The death rate of 24,000 flu cases under conventional medical care in that study was 28.2 percent, while the death rate of 26,000 cases treated with homeopathy was a nearly miraculous 1.05 percent. Similarly, many homeopathic physicians each reported treating thousands of patients with very few deaths.1

    In the homeopathic hospitals, the majority of patients were given gelsemium which increases body temperature, which augmented the body’s own immune response. In the allopathic hospitals, aspirin was the drug of choice, and aspirin reduces body temperature, effectively working against the immune system.

    Next, I will tell you how to make ‘potentized’ drugs, the highly diluted and energetic drugs that homeopaths usually prescribe, and then tell you of a shortcut that you can instantly make use of.

    How to make your own Potentized Remedies

    If you go to your local health food store and look at the homeopathic (potentized) remedies, you will see they have a name, and a number/letter combination after the name. IE: Bryonia 6C, which is wild hops. Potentized medicines are substances that have been serially diluted a certain number of times with a process known as succussion after each dilution. Historically, medicines are either diluted 1 to 10, known as X dilutions or 1 to 100, known as C dilutions. Coffea 9X means that a tincture of coffee was diluted by a factor of 10, 9 times. A 9X dilution would then contain only 1 part per billion of the original substance. Originally these medicines were made by the doctor himself, or by a pharmacist skilled in homeopathic preparations. The most common potencies used are 3, 6, 9, 12, 30, and 200 in either C or X dilutions. Even if the orginal substance were extremely toxic, a dilution above 6C contains such a minuscule amount (1 part per million) of the original toxic substance, that it is safe to ingest. A 30C dilution would statistically not contain even 1 atom of the actual substance.

    The original way

    To make a 6C preparation of a soluble material, the pharmacist or doctor would need to first make a tincture (material dissolved in ethanol) by soaking the material in a vial with the appropriate amount of ethanol until the soluble parts were extracted. This tincture is the starting point, and only a small amount is needed, so it was usually stored for when the drug was called for again.

    Next, the dr would need 6 small vials with stoppers. Into the first vial, he would put 1cc of the tincture and add 99cc of distilled water. This vial was then stoppered, and the vial was sharply rapped 50 to 100 times against the palm of the hand, or traditionally, a large leather bound book (a bible was often used). This step is called ‘succussion’. After the succussion the vial contains the 1C potency. One cc of the 1C potency was then transferred to the second vial, and the process repeated giving the 2C potency. This was repeated until the desired 6C potency was achieved. Notice that there is nothing high tech about this process. One only needs a number of sterile vials, ethanol, distilled water, and a little elbow grease. Today of course we simply buy what we want, and there are only a very few that require a prescription to buy.

    An easier method

    The trouble with the above procedure is that it uses a lot of vials; for a 200C potency, one would need 200 vials. So early on, the doctors discovered that it worked just as well to use only one vial, and at the end of each succussion stage, they simply discarded all but 1 tenth, or 1 hundredth of the remedy, keeping the other part for the next dilution. Thats the way I do it. Also, it doesn’t seem to matter if the dilution ratio is actually very accurate. Whether its 10, 20, or 100, it works just as well provided the number of dilutions is more than 6.

    Since homeopathic potentized remedies are easily obtained in health food stores, and internet shops, you probably won’t ever have a need to actually make most of the remedies.

    A word about potency

    The higher the number of dilutions, the stronger, and more pure the remedy becomes. So Bryonia 30C is more potent than Bryonia 6C. I know that goes completely against logic on the surface. Homeopathy is usually criticized as being quackery because the remedies contain little to none of the active ingredient. They are just sugar or alcohol right? I will try to answer that from my experience as an electronics engineer in a quartz crystal factory. Back in the 70′s, as I was studying quartz, and developing processing techniques, I learned that water will form long chain polymers when it contacts another substance. The water itself changes from being in contact with something else. This property of water actually caused a lot of trouble in the manufacturing process, and I think that this little known fact is the key to what makes the remedies work.

    In the initial tincture, we have molecules of the substance mingling with the water molecules present along with the alcohol. The succussion phase adds energy to the liquid, and facilitates the water molecules combining into the polymers. Each subsequent dilution and succussion then decreases the amount of the original substance while allowing more H2O molecules to rearrange themselves. So I see at least one plausible explanation of how these potentized medicines could work, or at least how they differ from just plain water.

    A few more observations about Homeopathy

    In 1993 I went to see a well known alternative medicine doctor about a serious problem I was having. In a discussion we were having about homeopathy, he told me that homeopathy did not work. I asked what proof he had that it did not, and his response was: “I heard about a remedy which was supposed to be really good for blood pressure, and I tried it on 30 of my patients. It didn’t help them”. Ok, you should already see the problem with his statement. In fact he didn’t do homeopathy, which is matching a patient’s symptoms to a drug picture. Instead, he tried to match a drug to a diagnosis, which is allopathy, or N2D2 medicine. Thirty patients with high blood pressure might require a different well chosen drug for each patient.

    If you go to the health food store and pick up a vial of Bryonia, or Thuja, or any homeopathic remedy, you will also find on the bottle a disease recommendation. It might say for constipation, or headaches, or some other such nonsense. In fact, the FDA requires all over the counter drugs to have such labeling, and that is totally contrary to the tenets of homeopathy. But the average Joe doesn’t know that, and he will pick up the little vial, take it home, and when it doesn’t work will blame homeopathy, when in fact he hasn’t yet tried homeopathy. You might say there is a conspiracy against it, probably because the FDA doesn’t understand the concepts or because the drugs are cheap and none of them are toxic.

    In the early days, the late 1800′s and early 1900′s, homeopaths were among the most respected members of a community. But their problem was the amount of time it took to provide patient care. While the homeopath was digging through his Repertory and Materia Medica after an initial 2 hour visit with a patient, an allopathic doctor could see a dozen patients and give them a little bag of aspirin. IE: There was a lot more money in allopathic medicine, both for the doctors and the drug companies. Also, the AMA targeted homeopathic physicians, and worked hard to destroy homeopathy. As a result, homeopathy declined; but now its making a comeback in alternative medicine, and veterinary medicine.

    So now you know a little about homeopathy and have at least one practical trick in the bag. I hope you found this interesting at least, and more so I hope you found it useful.

    Most importantly, know when to treat yourself, and when to seek medical help from a doctor. Homeopathy cannot treat everything, and using it effectively does require skill.

    1) DivineOdyssey.com

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    Posted in Alternate Health | No Comments »

    Colloidal Silver (Silver Nanoparticles) Banned as a Pesticide

    Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

    Who would have thought that a washing machine would bring down the scrutiny of the EPA regarding silver nano-particles?  That is what happened though with Samsung’s Silver Wash machine which was claimed to inhibit bacteria in clothing by its ionic silver technology.

    It seems that the Environmental Protection Agency has decided that Silver Nanoparticles are pesticides and need to be regulated.  This is another blow to health freedom, intended or not.

    The Environmental Protection Agency has decided to regulate a large class of consumer items made with microscopic “nanoparticles” of silver, part of a new but increasingly widespread technology that may pose unanticipated environmental risks, a government official said yesterday.

    The decision — which will affect the marketing of high-tech odor-destroying shoe liners, food-storage containers, air fresheners, washing machines and a wide range of other products that contain tiny bacteria-killing particles of silver — marks a significant reversal in federal policy. It also creates an unexpected regulatory hurdle for the burgeoning field of nanotechnology, which involves the creation of materials just a few ten-thousandths the diameter of a human hair.1

    So while the FDA’s stance is that Colloidal Silver is ineffective, the EPA’s stance is that it is too effective, and might wipe out all the beneficial bacteria in the environment.   It is interesting that the EPA does not seem to care about the tons of antibiotics that get flushed away and pissed down peoples toilets every year, or chlorine which is another substance that kills beneficial bacteria, but it is allowed in our water supply.  This seems terribly inconsistent to me. That is, unless there is another hidden agenda.  Perhaps the government does not want citizens to be able to take care of themselves in the event of a pandemic disease outbreak.

    According to the EPA, CS generators may not be sold without approval after March 21, 2008.   The EPA website describes the rule as follows:

    Any person distributing or selling such equipment on or before the date of publication of this notice may continue the distribution or sale of such equipment for 6 months from the date of publication of the notice (March 21, 2008).

    You may be affected by this action if you sell or distribute ion-generating equipment that uses electrodes to emit chemical substances for pesticidal purposes. Potentially affected equipment include but are not limited to, washing machines containing electrodes that emit silver, copper, or zinc ions and ion generators used in swimming pools to kill algae and as an adjunct to the chlorination process.2

    Obviously, CS generators fall under this description.  Interestingly though, the EPA’s definition extends only to metal ions.  Metallic (non ionic) CS seems not to be covered by this rule yet3.  It is hard to understand how silver metal could be banned, as it is naturally occurring in nature, albeit not usually in nano-particle form.

    Since CS generators are still available for purchase, the EPA has apparently not taken any action against the manufacturers yet.  However just as the FDA has attacked CS producers, it is reasonable to expect the EPA to do likewise.

    At some point, providing information about making CS at home may become illegal.  If so, the instructions about building your own, which is incredibly easy, will disappear from the internet.

    In times past, I would have recommended writing your Senators and Representatives about this issue, but alas, in view of the governments responsiveness on issues much more important, I feel that it is a useless waste of time.  (You probably know what I mean.)

    1) Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, November 23, 2006; Page A01

    2) Pesticide Registration: Clarification for Ion-generating Equipment

    3) An ion is simply an atom that has lost or gained one or more electrons giving it an electrical charge.  This electrical charge changes the atoms reactivity and properties.

    Posted in Alternate Health, Nature, Science | 7 Comments »